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Monday, January 5, 2015

Ohhh the kitchen.. I love seeing this transformation! It brings back so many good memories and makes me wish I had another HUGE project I could dive into. I have so many milestone pictures that I did not include what it looked like when we first moved in, but you can see those here. For the purposes of this post, the pictures start at the point just before we started knocking down walls. (In other words, we had already painted the walls and the cabinets and had gotten the new appliances).

Here we go!

I really did love this little chalkboard wall and little nook...

The galley kitchen however? No thank you. I always felt like I was in a cave!

The fridge stuck out SO FAR when it was in this spot. It was constantly in the way!

When we first started the demolition, it wasn't necessarily planned... We KNEW we were going to renovate the kitchen at some point in the near future, but one Saturday we just couldn't take it anymore and just decided to start opening up the walls! I love the wallpaper we found behind the cabinets.

You don't even want to KNOW how hard I cried when we saw this huge pipe in the wall. All I could think about was how freaking expensive it would be to move it (and it was!)

Being able to see the light shine through the open was AMAZING! Even with so many beams still up and all of the mess, it was a heavenly sight!

Living in a construction zone = no fun. I was always buying flowers to try to make it look a LITTLE more pleasant.

We did all of the demolition, framing, and drywalling work ourselves (with the help of an amazing 80-year old city inspector who would spend hours a day at our house basically telling us step by step what to do! Thank you Gil!) We hired out the plumbing, electrical, and flooring. Here is a picture of what the room looks like with the plumbing complete. Goodbye huge pipe!

The WORST part of the whole renovation was removing the floors. You wouldn't think it would be that bad, but there were FIVE LAYERS of flooring (If you scroll up again, you can see how much the floor height varied between the Pergo flooring and wood floors - like a solid two inches!) , and I think they used a gallon of super glue and 100 nails to lay each layer. It was brutal. It was backbreaking work, it was messy, it was miserable. It was so hard that we ALMOST decided to lay the new wood flooring above the bottom layer of linoleum , but figured we'd regret it later and pushed through to expose the subfloor.

Here is a shot of what it looked like with the the electrical work complete and the floors stripped down to the subfloor.

Here is a shot with the new flooring laid but not stained. Love that it is completely level. Definitely worth all of the extra work to have a seamless transition to the dining room!

Stained floors!! Woo hoo!

And here it is with the baseboard trim installed.

The only other major construction work to do was the built-ins for the fridge.

Love all of the storage!﻿

The goal for 2015 is to finally get new counters and a new farmhouse kitchen sink. Still debating the marble, but thinking I will take the plunge and just do it. Nothing in our house is perfect anyway, so if the marble gets a little beat up it will just match everything else in the house. It will have "character." My father-in-law's mother who is from Italy told me that it was a GOOD thing in Italy if your marble counters were beat up because it meant you were a good cook and you had a happy home. I love that!

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Ok, I am not a good cook, but the happy home part definitely rings true :)

8 comments:

OMG jaw droppingly amazing transformation! I adore your kitchen (which isn't a surprise because i adore everything else in your home). Go for the marble! Get what you most want. Sure, it may stain a little but who cares! I can't wait to see more!

Don't hesitate to MARBLE-ize you counter top. Aside from its versatility, it really enhances the appeal of any kitchen. Your kitchen already looks great and cozy, and I could only imagine how beautiful it would look more once the marble counters are installed. :-)

I just love your house it looks really nice! I am sure it required a lot of work. The chalk board is a very nice touch. I struggled when it came to picking out what to decorate my house as. I ended up getting some help on that end rather than going at it myself. After all it needed greatness.

Wow, the remodel looks great after the plumbing, electrical jobs were done! Knocking down that wall literally made it a whole new room. The huge fridge and added storage space definitely help in that regard as well. I would strongly recommend marble countertops! A little bit of wear makes it look even better, in my humble opinion.